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Automated Pro-Trump Bots Overwhelmed Pro-Clinton Messages
- pdog 10y agoI'm worried about the sudden drumbeat of post-election "fake news" articles. It's really just a subtle form of censorship (and an attempt to control the social media narrative).
- lawless123 10y agoThere stories still doing the rounds saying Hillary, Soros etc are all some stanic pedo cabal..
- simosx 10y agoThe question is, should Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit work harder to identify those networks and publicise those attempts to game the social networks? These companies have all the tools to figure out orchestrated efforts.
- DominikR 10y agoWell I would say that is up to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit shareholders to decide since it is their property. You don't get to cancel property rights because you don't like the reporting there. You also don't get to cancel freedom of speech because you don't like what someone is saying.
- d_e_solomon 10y agoA private company censoring the content on their platform is not a violation of freedom of speech. I believe that the point being argued is that they have a responsibility to filter out automated messaging.
- DominikR 10y ago> A private company censoring the content on their platform is not a violation of freedom of speech It's not, but a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship. > I believe that the point being argued is that they have a responsibility to filter out automated messaging. No, there is no responsibility whatsoever. Users are free to not use the service if they don't like it. If you see this different then we have different views on what private property is.
- grzm 10y ago"a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship." Would you expand on this? I don't follow how a third party other than the state could force Facebook to censor?
- DominikR 10y agoI'm not going to answer such a question pretending you are a 3 year old that really doesn't know how media + government collude and operate to control society. You are incapable of seeing how it poses a threat to freedom of speech when all major media combined call for censorship? There's no point for me to engage in a discussion with you.
- d_e_solomon 10y agoYou've veered off into conspiracy theory and name calling. Nice.
- grzm 10y agoI'm sorry, but I think I'm asking a different question. I'm not asking about whether Facebook can engage in censorship. That was addressed by you here: > A private company censoring the content on their platform is not a violation of freedom of speech It's not, but a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship. I'm asking how a third party (someone other than Facebook or the government) can force Facebook to censor. I think figuring out how to create a constructive online community is an important and complex issue. It's not as simple as letting everybody do whatever they want. And limiting what can be done includes limiting speech in some way. How you do that in a way that's not censorship is a legitimate question.
- bbctol 10y agoJust saying "it's their property" might not address the underlying question. Should it be? How important does a platform get before it needs public regulation to prevent harms to its users?
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoAnd additionally, in a democracy, isn't one voice per human being the only appropriate principle? Why should the angriest, shrillest people with the deepest pockets get to swing public discussion by just bombarding the rest of us with their propaganda until we regurgitate it?
- E6300 10y agoIf everyone must speak at the same volume, then broadcasting or any kind or public speaking are impossible. All communication must consist of 1-on-1 conversations or among small groups. If you allow broadcasting, then eventually some voices will be louder than others.
- d_e_solomon 10y agoI think the point is that if a voice is speaking louder, than it has a larger responsibility to the public. If the voice is automated on a platform, and isn't serving the public good, then the platform has a responsibility to prevent it.
- E6300 10y agoThe main point of eli_gottlieb's comment was that money is effective at swaying public opinion. This is obvious. It's the whole point of advertising and marketing. I think whether the source is automated or not is a secondary concern, since all broadcasting involves some automation. I don't agree that a broadcaster has a responsibility to their audience. If a broadcaster starts screwing up consistently -- for example, by relaying false or unsubstantiated information -- the audience has the choice to move on to the next guy. I also don't agree that it's necessarily the platform's responsibility to control what's on it, although it has that option.
- DominikR 10y agoThis is the second NYT article I see here today that is calling for more censorship because of some unsubstantiated claims. These people must be completely out of their minds.
- cmdrfred 10y agoThey just want social media to do what main stream media has been doing since William Randolph Hearst.
- dominotw 10y agoI am guessing a reaction to total loss of trust in media by general public. Now they have launched a mass propaganda against alternative news by calling them "fake news" . Nytimes just doesn't get it.
- tdb7893 10y agoI don't know if you have never met anyone who thought Obama was born in Kenya, or that Hillary Clinton murdered one of her campaign staffers but there is definitely fake news out there.
- aaron-lebo 10y agoHere is the paper: http://politicalbots.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Data-Memo-US-Election.pdf http://politicalbots.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Data-Mem... I really dislike the basis of their research which is: Twitter provides free access to a sample of the public tweets posted on the platform. The platform’s precise sampling method is not known, but the company itself reports that the data available through the Streaming API is at most one percent of the overall global public communication on Twitter any given time. [6] So...we aren't going to mention a selection issue at all? Is that 1% of global Tweets a truly random sample? Can you confirm Twitter isn't manipulating the output? We have examples of them censoring stuff this cycle... In order to get the most complete and relevant data set, the tweets were collected by following particular hashtags identified by the team as being actively used during the debate. What's the methodology for selection? I'd hope research out of Oxford would be a little better argued. But of course since it's Oxford this research will get quoted in the New York Times by people who probably don't understand the paper they are reporting on and we'll have talking heads endlessly parroting why this justifies censorship. All this research is showing evidence of is that the stream Twitter provides is pro-Trump. It's a massive leap of faith to assume this data truly is representative and non-biased.
- d_e_solomon 10y agoIgnoring whether it's pro-Trump or pro-Clinton, don't you find the idea of automated parroting of political speech via bots a bit obnoxious? And maybe the platforms - Twitter, etc - have a responsibility to not publish those posts?
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago> Ignoring whether it's pro-Trump or pro-Clinton, don't you find the idea of automated parroting of political speech via bots a bit obnoxious? In a way, I'm terrified that fascism can now just "chatterbot" its way into the popular consensus. In another way, I'm incredibly relieved that a significant portion of the fascist speech I see on the web isn't real.
- brightball 10y ago
- nashashmi 10y agoI find it surprising that degree-less, low-income, conservatives (classical trump supporters) are going to be techy enough to program Pro-Trump bots. The tech hackers are not on the conservative scene, but on the liberal front. This is why Obama had such a great campaign in both terms, and the conservative I-want-it-too failed outright. Edit: LOL! I get downvoted for being demeaning, but my points stands. No apologies.
- coldcode 10y agoDoes a bot writing tweets mean anything if no one reads them?
- pessimizer 10y agoNon-automated, boiler-room conversation disruptors from the Clinton campaign overwhelmed online forums throughout the election. They all disappeared the day after; most of them seemed to disappear at around 5:00 CST on election day. I still don't know how press-releasing that you were going to have people on discussion boards paid to disrupt negative messages, and who were not going to identify themselves, was a good move. It didn't seem like a legal requirement to go public; could it have been to drum up business for Brock himself to do the same service for other companies or politicians, or just a way to seem forward-looking and tech-savvy (and Obama-like?) It's strange that the left-identified candidate would openly use a tactic that was previously associated with China and Russia (employing boiler-room internet trolls at scale.) Especially for Clinton, who spent a lot of time during the campaign trying to promote new Cold War fears. In addition, it ended up compromising the advocacy of her honest supporters by putting them under the suspicion of being paid people. It was pretty terrifying how many fake people were used from both major candidates this election. This bot/shill divide between the campaigns looks like another way in which Trump went frugal and still managed to be effective. I think that in the end, Brock's people ended up repulsing voters rather than helping their candidate.
- squozzer 10y ago>“Anyone who claims that automated spam accounts that tweeted about the U.S. election had an effect on voters’ opinions or influenced the national Twitter conversation clearly underestimates voters and fails to understand how Twitter works,” said Nick Pacilio, a Twitter spokesman. The general approach to propaganda is to analyze the target audience and look for vulnerabilities (messages that might work) and susceptibilities (the effectiveness of a given message.) The research link from politicalbots.org looks like a first-order pass using hashtags as a proxy for actual content, which is usually harder to analyze in an automated fashion. Understandable, but prone to errors, such as using pro-candidate hashtags with anti-candidate content. But getting to the heart of the matter, it's hard to say how effective computational propaganda was in this election without more detailed testing and analysis. Generally, a political campaign aims to do three things -- 1) motivate their followers to vote; 2) convert undecideds; 3) demoralize opponents. I could see bots doing 1) and 3) pretty well, but 2) not so much. Of course, a well-designed experiment could prove me wrong.
- 1024core 10y ago> For example, the top 20 accounts, which were mostly bots and highly automated accounts, averaged over 1,300 tweets a day That works out to about 1 tweet/minute per day... how is this not spam? Why can't Twitter do the most basic of spam filtering? And you know why I don't use Twitter anymore? It's because of this. They optimized for the wrong metric: the number of accounts, or the number of tweets/day.
- TYPE_FASTER 10y ago> They optimized for the wrong metric: the number of accounts, or the number of tweets/day. Who optimized for this, Twitter or the SV VCs?
- colordrops 10y agoWhat about the fact that Twitter deleted trending hashtags that were negative to Clinton? And the takeover of reddit's /r/politics by the Correct the Record PAC? This story is far bigger than a few twitter bots. It's hard to know anymore who is genuine and who is a paid sock puppet in certain forums.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y agoThere's been a lot of talk on reddit about CTR astroturfing but has there been any proof? Seems to me it could just be normal Hillary supporters.
- buckbova 10y agoIt was quite obvious for regular readers because the day after the election the entire makeup of the subreddit changed.
- epistasis 10y agoThere could have been some other event that changed the makeup too...
- hiddenkrypt 10y agoIf you say so. I've been glued to that sub for months, and it's still filled with anti-trump messages, pro hillary, pro bernie stories.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y agoI'm not sure what you mean by the entire makeup changed? It seemed that a lot of democrats were upset by the election, but I didn't notice anything that would leave me to believe that shills had left or ever even existed there in the first place.
- return0 10y ago(disclaimer: i m not american). Well a visit to /r/politics at the time would convince you. Also note how /r/the_donald had like ~250.000 users while /r/hillaryclinton ~30.000 . So it seems most hillary supporters would deflect to /r/politics because they liked what they saw there.
- ryanx435 10y agoif you've read wikileaks, you would know that the New York Times is a known colluder with the Clinton Campaign and therefore can't be trusted with any political coverage.
- perseusprime11 10y agoThis election taught me an important lesson about our media. I stop subscribing to CNN, FoxNews, NYTimes, and Washington Post. I will not click on any of their links or tweet their links for that matter. I signed up for Intercept for my daily dose of news. So far the reporting is excellent!
- grzm 10y agoI think it's good to keep a critical eye on the news you consume. Perhaps I'm misreading, but please don't rely on just one source. I encourage you to read a variety of sources.
- d_e_solomon 10y agoThat's roughly the equivalent of trading a diet of donuts for a diet of cocaine. One's not healthy, the other will make you crazy.
- perseusprime11 10y agoIsn't that what's happening on Twitter? More bubbles for future....https://www.fastcompany.com/3065777/inside-gab-the-new-twitter-alternative-championed-by-the-alt-right https://www.fastcompany.com/3065777/inside-gab-the-new-twitt...
- rokosbasilisk 10y agoSame. Wikileaks really showed the corruption runs deep.
- TheCowboy 10y agoI think you have to say more than this else it just amounts to a non-constructive partisan comment. Wikileaks does zero curation. No human-being has the time to read everything they post, and there is still a problem of verifying the authenticity of sources.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lawless123 10y ago" and identified automated posting by finding accounts that post at least 50 times a day." But they could just have 25 bots post twice a day..
- niels_olson 10y agoProducing false statements about people with intent is libel. The people who deploy such bots should be held accountable every bit as much as any journalist. Job title means nothing: a fake news purveyor and a journalist should be held to the same standard.